My initial conversation with Shazia Khanum was part of a report I was compiling on young girls engaged in informal employment. The 16-year-old deftly rolled bidis—cigarettes made from tobacco wrapped in tendu leaves—while sharing her story. She mentioned that she produces between 300 and 500 of these thin cigarettes daily, earning slightly more than £1 on a good day, equating to around 250 rupees for 1,000 bidis.
In the small workshop located in rural Yarab Nagar, Karnataka, India, numerous other girls perform the same labor under similar conditions. The workspace lacks basic sanitation facilities. When I inquired about how she handles her menstrual cycle, Khanum directed me to a makeshift area behind a curtain where she uses cloth rags to manage her period.
Last week, approximately 6,000 miles away in Australia, world leaders and advocates convened to unveil the Melbourne Declaration for Gender Equality. This initiative presents a framework aimed at fostering gender-responsive funding, reforming policies, and fundamentally altering the distribution of power and resources to benefit those who are most affected by inequality.
The atmosphere inside the conference was charged with urgency and unity. Women and LGBTQ+ leaders candidly addressed issues of power, funding, and rights, a dialogue that felt both overdue and precarious. The declaration itself is undeniably ambitious; however, for individuals like Khanum working in India’s informal sector, its promises feel far removed from their reality.
This observation is not meant to criticize but rather to highlight the challenges that the declaration seeks to address.
The Melbourne Declaration emphasizes the accountability of governments and political figures, explicitly stating their responsibility to ensure that local civil society receives adequate resources, political protection, and global connections while remaining rooted in local communities.
It advocates for the priorities, knowledge, language, and political objectives of those most impacted by injustice to inform the work being done within the gender-equality landscape.
Khanum is not an isolated case but rather part of a statistic that remains largely unacknowledged. She belongs to the 61% of female workers in India’s non-agricultural sector who are employed informally, and she is among the 80% of South Asian women working without formal protections.
With no formal contract, payslips, or access to government welfare programs, she is effectively invisible in the eyes of the state.
The declaration explicitly addresses this gap, holding governments responsible for ensuring that civil society is well-supported and locally grounded. It calls for the lived experiences and priorities of those affected by injustice to shape the gender-equality agenda. However, this requires a system that is willing to recognize individuals like Khanum.
While India’s government has made some progress, such as the e-Shram portal registering over 300 million informal workers and the existence of pension schemes like Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maandhan (PM-SYM) for the unorganized sector, Khanum remains unaware of these initiatives. Though registration exists, there is a lack of outreach, leaving her unseen by the system. Despite the government acknowledging that approximately 45% of India’s GDP is derived from the informal sector, this recognition has not yet led to sustained grassroots engagement that would make a tangible difference for a 16-year-old in Yarab Nagar.
This highlights a critical divide: the gap between commitment and actual outreach. Maliha Khan, the president and chief executive of Women Deliver, the architects behind the declaration, asserts that holding leaders accountable must also involve ensuring that public systems recognize and address the realities of all individuals.
It is essential for mechanisms to be practical, which includes providing direct funding to grassroots women’s rights organizations, collaborating with unions and informal worker networks, and ensuring that government policies are formulated with input from these communities.
Organizations like Spandana, which assist adolescent girls in the gig economy with access to sexual and reproductive health services, play a vital role in bridging the gap between global initiatives and local circumstances. Grassroots civil society serves as a crucial platform for reclaiming momentum, fostering alliances, and safeguarding the future of gender justice.
For individuals like Khanum to truly benefit from the promises of the Melbourne Declaration, they require direct access to financial resources and healthcare. This can be achieved through support from local organizations or by funding community health workers, enhancing healthcare systems, and involving informal workers in policy discussions.
As Khan aptly states, the effectiveness of the declaration will ultimately be measured by its ability to translate into policy, financing, and action, and whether it results in meaningful change for women whose work has historically been overlooked, undervalued, and unprotected.
As applause echoed throughout the conference halls in Melbourne, I realized that Khanum would be at her workbench, rolling her 500th bidi of the day. She remains unaware of the declaration’s existence and the ongoing discussions aimed at addressing the systemic failures that impact her life. Her aspirations are simple: she hopes for better pay and access to proper sanitation facilities.
Cheena Kapoor is a journalist and documentary photographer based in Delhi.
